Team Obama has turned upside down over Syria. Once-dovish Secretary of State John Kerry is now a hawk, while America’s top general seems to fear military action.

In a high-level meeting last week, Kerry called for strikes on Syrian airfields to aid rebels warring with Bashar al-Assad. But Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took issue with that.

According to Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Dempsey said the Air Force “could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the US would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties.” In April, he stressed the difficulty of creating a no-fly zone there.

By all means, a good general should consider his troops’ safety and think ahead in planning action. But Dempsey isn’t fooling anyone: Israeli planes struck Syria twice in May, hitting a missile depot and a chemical-weapons site. In January, Israel destroyed a Syrian convoy carrying anti-aircraft missiles. It bombed a Syrian nuclear facility in 2007. And Israeli jets buzzed Assad’s palaces in 2006 and 2003.

It’s not as if Israel has superior weaponry — it uses American-made F-15s and F-16s, and it lacks the stealth bombers America has. Yet its strikes didn’t take hundreds of flights or cost Israel any planes or pilots.

Ultimately, of course, it will be up to the president to decide how America responds to the conflict in Syria, which lately has tilted in favor of its butcher dictator and his allies from Hezbollah and Iran.

But part of Dempsey’s job is to offer options and strategies from which his boss can choose — not to sabotage any and all action by hyping risks. He’d do well, that is, to focus on shooting down enemies rather than ideas for dealing with Assad.